Achievement

All IGERT students participated in a two day field-trip to Yellowstone National Park to visit hot spring sites that are also the subject of our IGERT academic case-study assignments. Although not measured as a tangible product, the field trip to geothermal features of YNP provided a unique opportunity for students to integrate different disciplinary components in a field context, where reaction and molecular scale processes lead to macroscopic phenomena visible to the naked eye (e.g. Fe-oxidizing microbial mats, carbonate mineralizing microbial filaments, stratified phototrophic microbial mats). The field observations achieve context for interdisciplinary linkage within the same microbial community, experiences which were then integrated and reflected in our academic case-study assignments.